I wasn't so much counting tax "cuts" (although that's a valid point) but the fallacy that decreasing taxes and increasing spending are mutually compatible. Three administrations of Republicans have favored this, and three administration of Republicans have run massive deficits. Only Bush Sr. had the courage to raise taxes to cover what he wanted to spend. Ultimately, (-1) + (-1) != 2, which is what has been claimed by Republicans.
While the Democrats have done their share of "optimistic" math (optimistic economic assumptions and undercounting program costs and tax increases), the Republicans have based their ideals on smaller (federal) government and fiscal responsibility, two things at which the last three administrations of Republicans have failed miserably. Either their math is wrong (hence the comment) or they are being untrue to their (proclaimed) ideals.
whatever the threshhold for the McD's pedometer is either very high or inconsistent - I don't study my girlfriend's steps but I don't think they are that nonconstant. It only reads about one in three, and while it doesn't read steps, it will read jumps, which is consistent with your point. Whatever method it uses doesn't work on a practical level - it doesn't count the normal steps someone makes and so is not useful for counting exercise.
they aren't even worth the $0.25 that they must have cost - the pedometer couldn't count steps accurately, or even close (about one step read for every three taken). So, unless you believe that Republican budget math is accurate (in which case these will work just fine at counting your steps in the same way), the McPedometers don't work well and aren't worth the plastic they're made of. The coroner won't be able to get anything out of the Adult Happy Meal pedometer after your untimely demise other than that you should have eaten somewhere other than McD's instead.
and we all know how well Microsoft knows security - I guess if they can't build better locks, they would figure that executing people for breaking and entering is reasonable.
Innocence itself is not evaluable in the absence of evidence - I can claim "I didn't do X" in the absence of evidence that I didn't do X, and the courts will come to the same conclusion they did before. I made the assumption that "actual innocence" as a claim for appeal is backed by evidence that supports that claim, because without the evidence, one is blowing smoke. In that sense, Justice Scalia is correct - a claim of innocence with no evidence to support it is not a sufficient cause for appeal.
In most cases where actual innocence is used as a basis for appeal, there is (some) evidence to support the assertion. In some fraction of those cases, the prisoner is gaming the system - however we have other means to look at the balance of evidence in cases than to ignore such claims. For civil cases, we have dismissal with prejudice and malicious prosecution for bad cases (and maybe also others - IANAL). It should be possible for either other judges or intermediaries to look at a claim for appeal and determine if it has sufficient merit to proceed. That might help, or there might be other ways to do it that would avoid overwhelming the system. In other cases, the evidence is better, and in those cases, a claim of actual innocence isn't required to make the case worth looking at - it just makes the claim more urgent. If most cases were simply claims of innocence without support, then removing actual innocence as a cause for appeal would help unburden the judicial system and would make sense, but I don't know if such claims make up a significant fraction of cases.
Actual innocence as an unsubstantiated claim shouldn't be a basis for appeal - my assumption reading the quote was the Scalia was referring to cases where such evidence exists (or else the cases in which he made the remark would not have proceeded to get to the SC). The only alternative (to the presence of evidence in an actual innocence claim) I can see is if the defense believes that the evidence is consistent with the innocence of their client, but that doesn't suffice to make a claim of actual innocence (the evidence only says the person hasn't been proven to have done the crime, not that he didn't do it). In the case, though, the defense is SOL without other evidence.
I agree with your point - I made some assumptions in coming to the defense of "actual innocence" claims that may have been different than what Justice Scalia meant. I just figured that most such claims include other evidence to support the claims, and with such evidence, the claims should be heard by someone.
in a book of quotations, there was a quote (apparently it wasn't for its humor or wit) where an IRA assassin said "Christ, I'm in the wrong house." I don't know which violent act that referred to, but it doesn't sound like a successful one. Rule one for successful assassins - kill the right person. (Of course, that ignores ST Rule One for assassinations - "kill the assassins." - but that's neither here nor there).
Then we have mishaps such as an elderly preacher in Columbus dying of a heart attack when the police showed up in SWAT gear to bust the wrong house, or the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The first could have been prevented with data such as that being gathered here.
...while there is (a lot) of frivolous defense by people convicted of really bad things trying to stay alive by gaming the legal system, apparently it hasn't prevented significant numbers (at least 75, probably > 100, or at least 2% of death penalty cases) of innocent people from being convicted.
The evidence that more than a few of the people convicted of death penalty crimes were innocent (including half? of IL's death row) indicates that the system is flawed. The existence of these flaws and the fact that we know they exist requires us to do something about them, both for the sake of the people wrongly convicted and the people subject to crimes by an unknown person. Any privilege will be abused, but that abuse does not seem reason enough to negate innocence as a cause for appeal - by doing so, one negates much of why the justice system exists in the first place (to appropriately punish the guilty and to protect the innocent). Even if you cut the number of prisoners gaming the system, you have removed much of what is just and useful from the justice system and thus have won what can be described as a Pyrrhic victory at best.
(I haven't RTL) What is Scalia's justification for this? If there is "no basis is text, tradition, or even contemporary practice" to demand that evidence that the courts got the wrong person, why do they call it the "justice system"? In a case where evidence indicates that an innocent person was convicted, the justice system neither protected the people (the real person who committed the crime may still be free to do more) nor served justice (one person is paying for the crimes of another); since these are the primary (if not exclusive) duties of the justice, what is its purpose for existence if not to act justly or catch criminals? (particularly when "just" has no political bias, but is a measure of having convicted the correct person for a given crime, rather than an opinion on either the crime or the consistency of prosecution, etc.)
One of the many reasons I dislike Justice Scalia (or at least his legal opinions)...
WalMart is also the outlet (or one of them with the soon-to-be-defunct K-Mart) that pressures/forces artists to sell modified versions of their albums at their stores (if they wish to sell them there at all). So while selling VC and modified DVD players doesn't imply hypocrisy (they could just be committed to giving everyone what they want to buy, after all), selling bastardized albums while selling VC does imply a certain level of hypocrisy (unless they also sell the non-bastardized albums, which I didn't think they did).
(this isn't a disagreement with you, just the source you cited)
I didn't hear (or wasn't listening?) when these same people complained about the variety of movies shown on cable and network TV with similar, TV studio-set mdifications to the depiction (picture size and pausing) and content of movies. Where was the concept of "artistic integrity" then? Oh, they were getting paid for it, so showing (and distributing a modified form of their work) is legal, while watching (and not distributing) a modified version of their work under my control should be illegal. Integrity, my a$$.
Is this just another example of the content providers deciding what "fair use" should be (although fair use has never been theirs to determine)?
Artists have the right to distribute and sell their work as they see fit.
I have the right to watch (use) the work as I see fit. If I only want to watch the bar fight scene in "Out for Justice" instead of sitting through the rest of the movie, I can. That's what "fair use" means - as long as I don't distribute my bowdlerized version, it removes no rights from the authors of a work. I know that I'm viewing a modified version - that's why I chose to watch it on that DVD player in the first place. As long as WalMart specifies the capabilities the DVD to its users, and others don't distribute the modified content, the author's rights haven't been infringed.
People may not see the work as the author would have wanted them to, but that has been true of movies since the capacity to control one's own viewing of those works (on VCRs and DVDs) has been possible. If the author wants a work to be seen only in a specific way, he needs to specifiy that it not be sold in DVD or VCR format so that only those who see the whole movie can have access to it, or control the ability to fast forward or rewind through a work. Of course, in that case, few people would actually buy the work, or modified versions would quickly be pirated and sold to fill the void. Since I don't see this happening, I will assume that either they aren't in control (likely) or don't care. If you play in the real world, you play by real world rules - and in this case the people who pay for and buy the movies want to control their viewing of movies and how they see them. The artists don't have control over how we see movies, and unless they don't release to copyable formats, they never will.
(side note) I didn't hear (or maybe wasn't listening) when artists complained about the regular showing of heavily modified movies on broadcast and cable channels. Why is this any less permissible or less consistent with the artists' intent in a work than the use of DVD with user-controlled censoring?
They didn't release single songs because there was no competition - because the record companies colluded to raise prices and control their supply chain. The only reason they started releasing single songs is because if they didn't, their market would download what they wanted for free. Most people would rather get their music legitimately than not, but they aren't willing to swallow crap to do so. So now, the music industry has a model that allows customers to get what they want legally, thus negating many of the reasons why people use P2P to get music.
The problem is that the music industry got rich by giving people what the music industry wanted them to have, charging what they could for it, and colluding to prevent others from undercutting them. The music industry didn't have to listen to its customers because they had nowhere else to go. Now, customers want music how they want it, because if they don't get it, they can go online and copy it for free - a few would have done this anyway, but now the widespread frustration with the music industry and their pricing drove many more to do so. If the music industry moves to restore the album model to online music, they will simply succeed at driving people back to copying music via Kazaa, etc.., with the consequent improvement in technology making infringers harder to catch.
You're correct - they don't get it, because they colluded, and so never had to listen to the people to whom they sold music. Now they have no choice but to listen to their market, otherwise they'll get robbed blind. The music industry wants to go back to the days of blissful ignorance when they could do what they want and their customers would buy whatever they sold; they're hoping that "trusted computing" and upload restrictions by Internet providers will bring it back for them. The problem is, people are angry, and now they know it, and they know that they can do something about it. The music industry can't unring the bell, no matter how hard they try. Once people know that they have power, they won't go back to being consumers without a fight. The record companies are closing their eyes and hoping that their problems go away, when all that's going to go away is their market.
That was Payne Stewart's (professional golfer, US Open winner) plane. His plane took off (with six people on board?) from Florida, went silent about thirty minutes after takeoff, and ended up crashing somewhere in South Dakota when it ran out of fuel.
There may be results from the FAA accident investigation - I don't know.
1) Collusion (for which their customers got what - a whole $14 apiece?) in the sale of music - companies helped set the pricing of music despite what their customers would have told them had they listened.
2) the incestous relationship between radio stations and record (or at least many stations) - stations get goods and prizes for promoting bands (given by the labels) and so play the songs the labels want played, over and over and over... This wouldn't be so bad but the contraction in the ownership of radio means that many of the choices that would have existed for promoting bands outside of the RIAA don't exist. Thus people hear lots of homogenized crap on the radio and have the means to choose only which homogenized crap they listen to. (The RIAA has done their best to inhibit Internet radio, which would have undermined this as well).
3) Trying to take its users' fair use rights by copy protection. Since "copy protection" doesn't stop large-scale pirates or even moderately savvy copyright infringers, the only person who is stopped by copyright protection is the one who buys the music and follows the law. Essentially, the labels want to sell people's fair use rights to them, even though those rights aren't theirs to sell.
4) The music industry wants to sell albums with lots of filler - people want to buy good songs, not filler. So, instead of changing the quality or price of what they sold, labels ignored their customers and figured that their customers would always buy what they sold. Only because of illegal downloading of songs did things like iTunes, etc. come into play, filling a niche the music companies willfully ignored. When Napster and its spawn came, people could get what they wanted for free, but the system became popular not only because people could get something for nothing, but because it also gave them something they wanted (and couldn't get otherwise).
The record companies' business model was always doomed - as long as your plan is to sell crap (or good stuff mixed with crap) at your price, it will eventually fail, because either people will stop buying or some other company will steal your market. Their model isn't flawed because of the pursuit of copyright infringement (although their methods are heavy-handed and counterproductive, and the penalties assessed disproportionate); the need to pursue copyright infringement so zealously wouldn't exist had the industry treated its customers as if it wanted to earn their money rather than as if its customers' money were theirs by right. The RIAA figured it had 300M sheep for shearing - only now have they realized that some of the sheep have teeth, and 60M angry sheep can do nasty things to their shearers.
between NSA and their British equivalent - GCHQ? - that we would monitor British citizens for them and we would allow them to monitor Americans, and then pass on relevant information to one another. I don't know if this is correct, or just imaginative fiction, but it would neatly circumvent some of the legal prohibitions.
It has already been reported (in the Washington Times - about a year ago) that the Patriot Act 1 (which was written for terrorism and national security) has been used by the DOJ to circumvent the Constitution in a variety of cases against garden-variety criminals.
This doesn't seem like consistency in the application of the laws of the US, but enforcement to the contradiction of the law itself and the metalaw (the Constitution) under which it is empowered.
There is of course the issue of dealing with large problem first - a policy which works in most cases but seems to be ignored here. If porn were the US's only problem, then this might make sense. The Patriot Act, in theory, was passed to fight terror - yet the main initiatives that are designed to fight terrorism (Afghanistan, the search for OBL) have been ignored, downplayed, and given minimal resources while others with less saliency (Iraq, porn) have been given more resources, while the PA is used to do other things.
Even if the world were better off with less porn (an unproven assumption, at best), the resources spent fighting it aren't spent fighting more important issues, and so fighting it might (probably) make the US worse off. Considering the issue from which GWB draws much of his support (the "War on Terror") is the loser of the support being lavished on porn and obscenity, while the Administration's strength on terror is touted continually, I don't see how this fits any sense of either consistent law enforcement or policy.
...or TV, or cable - but they do expect to own their magazines and newspapers which they expect to be able to keep. Subscriptions models (or at least popular ones) tend to give individuals ownership, not just use, of content - not to distribute, but to use as they see fit. In addition, music has been sold for nearly a hundred years - no one expects to subscribe to music. Rental and subscription models work with movies, but only because bandwidth limits the copying of movies between computers. DivX failed because it cost like owning movies, required new hardware, and restricted the users' ability to do what they wanted with their movies in the timeframe for which they had use. Janus has all of the same disadvantages as DivX, plus the potential for higher prices (so the music companies can make more money on subscriptions while screwing the artists further because of the decreased revenue per song).
People are already used to purchasing their music - if one hundred years of doing so wasn't enough, other download services provide it already. Of course, we also have copyright infringement as well - via Kazaa, eMule, etc. - which has accustomed many to the idea of getting their music for free while being able to do what they want with it. All of these things argue against the success of subscription plans for music.
Of course, there is the bonus that many of the people who would think of this are dissatisfied with MS, and that as others have already brought up on this thread, all this copy protection requires to be circumvented is an analog-to-analog cable. Given the success of Kazaa, and the frustration of many with the music industry (and their desire for free music and their unwillingness to pay for crippled versions of such), this should take less than a year to be utterly pillaged, or to die a fiery death as P-O'd users pelt MS with tomatoes for selling them yet another crippled product.
Does this sound like Trusted Computing to you? In TC, everyone (MS, the RIAA and MPAA) can trust your computer but you...because you are no longer Microsoft/Intel's customer - the media companies are. It's their well-being that Trusted Computing is designed to benefit, rather than their users and purchasers. And if it takes flight (along with bandwidth controls) the output will be just like TV - a "push" medium where you (or, more accurately) your money is the product.
It worked in TV, and if people are stupid or negligent enough to let it happen to computers, it'll work there too.
then why does the CCP have to spend so much energy to prevent people from getting information uncongenial to it? If the CCP's decisions and methods are correct, won't an open discussion of them reveal that? If so many concur, then the agreement would strengthen the Chinesse government, and give it the far stronger backing of >600 M people. Instead, the CCP spends its time trying to prevent uncongenial information from getting to its people and keeping an army to suppress them, moves which cost it both resources to build itself better and standing in the markets and the world community upon which its future rests.
This isn't the behavior of a stable government in concurrence with its people, but a government perched on a pinnacle, which can be toppled with just a few of the right words. The US tolerates a lot of hypocrisy, but it endures because the availability of information allows people to judge their government (somewhat openly); thus while there is dissent on a daily basis, the dissent doesn't destroy the gov't system. The US has many small cracks, but it doesn't fall apart because it isn't brittle and the cracks don't spread - people have enough confidence in it that dissent doesn't coalesce against the system. The CCP doesn't behave as if it were confident in its correctness - dissent not expressed hardens into rebellion, and threatens the entire nation. The Chinese gov't behaves like a brittle structure - the CCP has to prevent cracks (dissent) because their disagreement with their people means that cracks will propagate and break the structure. If your structure can tolerate cracks and still stands, you don't worry about them because it's a waste of time and money. Cutting off information that disagrees with the CCP implies either 1) the people aren't smart enough to succeed (which means China will go nowhere anyway) or 2) the people would rebel against the CCP if they read the information. 1) doesn't concur with experience (the large number of successful Chinese graduate students in America), so 2) is pretty likely, which doesn't agree with your initial statement.
A gov't in the right doesn't need to shield its people from the truth.
with voting there is a rule/problem (I don't know its name - Condorcet is all that comes to mind) that any vote with more than two participants may yield cycles (for example, in some cases, A is prefered to B is preferred to C is preferred to A....) or other nonoptimalities; thus voting methods may not give results consistent with what everyone would want of independent of how the vote is done. The problem with runoff systems (do you want A or B? do you want B or C?...) is that they depend on the order or options chosen; thus the person selecting the choices may have more power to determine the outcomes than the people nominally choosing the outcomes.
So while this way of putting choices resolves much of the problems with overwhelming choices, it potentially puts significant power in the hands of the one choosing the choices. Under certain circumstances this could be catastrophic, such as in gov't, where the selection procedure would give the voters the appearance of power and responsibility while concentrating the actual decision-making capacity elsewhere, out of sight and responsibility. I don't know a practical method around this because any of the multiple voting systems can behave badly under certain circumstances, just that this may be flawed. I believe the same problems apply to the decision making method above.
The problem with the decision is that, since SCO actively employs contracts as weapons to use against their customers, any protection given by such contracts is illusory. Effectively, contracts with SCO protect their rights and remove yours. Previous experience would have indicated this with not much research. SCO has sued their customers more consistently and with greater effect than non-customers; being their customer is probably a guarantee of a suit, while not being a customer only leaves them with a chance of being sued. Even if not buying the licences were guaranteed to lead to a suit, the risk isn't much worse than the risks of being their customer, and your ability to defend against the suits is greater as a non-customer than a customer. If I have to fight SCO, I'd rather fight with all of my weapons intact than be their "buddy" only to be caught suprised and defenseless when they stab me in the back.
The only legitimate business question is whether choosing to buy SCO's "licences" would subject EV1 to more risk (both from SCO's use of contracts and from angry users) than being sued by SCO (and the consequent loss of users and gain in competitors' FUD) would. I don't know the answer to that.
I'm glad that Mr. Marsh admitted it was a mistake to sign on with SCO, but it would have been better had he (or the company's lawyers and businesspeople) thought this over some more before he did it.
I haven't RTA, but how does this exactly deal with the spam that comes from zombied computers and/or spoofed email addresses? While I wouldn't waste $2K to send spam, a spammer (who is paying for almost nothing else that he's using to send the crap anyway) wouldn't care about that money because it's not his. Thus he has no incentive (in fact, he has a larger incentive) to commit illegal acts - because spam that is whitelisted is likely to be more effective that spam that isn't.
At best, this seems like a large fine for not having sufficient security on your server (or for getting a virus that exploits an unpatched hole), which could be done more fairly by some other authority. At worst, it would be a cash cow for the certifying authority while driving legitimate email (since most mail is probably from nonservered or clueless people) elsewhere. This doesn't seem like a good idea, but I could be mistaken.
I haven't liked the concept of E-books because I don't want to lend my entire library out; I want to lend one book to someone and not be able to read that book, rather than have my entire library disabled when I let someone borrow a book - that hasn't been the case with e-books. Add the lack of additional functionality and I don't have a convincing reason to buy one.
People don't have the right to distribute material covered under copyright laws without the holders' permission.
Copyright holders have to allow certain uses for the distribution of their works (educational, etc.)
Why is that when copyright holders and their supporters (e.g the MPAA/RIAA) ask us to "respect copyright", they conveniently neglect their own imposition of copyright protections that can be easily dismantled by anyone but those willing to follow the law, and thus designed only to remove copyright-enabled privileges from those who do follow the law? Respect works two ways - yet for the RIAA, respect for copyright law is only reasonable when it benefits them.
Copyright infringement won't improve the artists' share of their own revenues (though P2P and legal downloading of songs may do that), nor will it halt the erosion of the rights of the people over copyrighted works. However, without copyright infringement, these issues would have been considered by very few, and probably ignored by most. Would song downloads (outside of the album format) have come about without the threat of copyright infringement? Since there was no competition with the RIAA, there was no alternative to choose that offered these until copyright infringement made it clear that a lot of people wanted songs, not albums. The RIAA is the limiting case - they have both colluded to maintain prices and selection and have also helped to erode the rights of the people over copyrighted works. By colluding, they negated legal ways for individuals to choose other ways to get music, and circumvented the ability of the market to control their behavior. This didn't leave much alternative for lots of people, and feeling screwed, they did what in other circumstances their consciences would have inhibited - they infringed the copyrights of others.
I don't disagree with your premise - there are good reasons why copyright infringement is a crime and why those who engage in it should be pursued. The problem for me is that copyright law is supposed to guarantee both my rights in using their works (but not distributing them) and the rights of the copyright holders to sell and distribute their works - at this moment, copyright law seems to be applied selectively to those who infringe the rights of the holders of copyright and not for those who infringe the rights of the people to use the copyrighted works. The RIAA in particular has short-circuited the ability of the market to enforce the rights of the users of copyrighted works, and the gov't has followed the money to the copyright holders' pockets. I am frustrated with the situation - I won't copy, but I don't know how else my rights as a user of copyrighted works will be taken seriously.
junk mailers pay for their use of the mail system - theoretically, they may even pay for some of other users' mail through their rates. Contrast with spam, where the evil bast@*d^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspammers don't pay for any of the bandwidth they use other than what they pay for their spamming computer (and the real lowlifes don't even pay that - they use viruses, etc. to zombie others into paying for and sending their spam). In addition, junk mail that lies can be subject to mail fraud, which can involve time in the federal prison system and a roommate/significant other named Bubba; presumably spam is subject to wire fraud stautes if it lies, but the spammers are harder to catch (I don't know if any spammers have been successfully prosecuted for this).
Junk mailers pay to send their messages. Spammers steal (bandwidth, time, cycles) from others to send theirs.
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I wasn't so much counting tax "cuts" (although that's a valid point) but the fallacy that decreasing taxes and increasing spending are mutually compatible. Three administrations of Republicans have favored this, and three administration of Republicans have run massive deficits. Only Bush Sr. had the courage to raise taxes to cover what he wanted to spend. Ultimately, (-1) + (-1) != 2, which is what has been claimed by Republicans.
While the Democrats have done their share of "optimistic" math (optimistic economic assumptions and undercounting program costs and tax increases), the Republicans have based their ideals on smaller (federal) government and fiscal responsibility, two things at which the last three administrations of Republicans have failed miserably. Either their math is wrong (hence the comment) or they are being untrue to their (proclaimed) ideals.
You can probably tell my bias from this...
whatever the threshhold for the McD's pedometer is either very high or inconsistent - I don't study my girlfriend's steps but I don't think they are that nonconstant. It only reads about one in three, and while it doesn't read steps, it will read jumps, which is consistent with your point. Whatever method it uses doesn't work on a practical level - it doesn't count the normal steps someone makes and so is not useful for counting exercise.
they aren't even worth the $0.25 that they must have cost - the pedometer couldn't count steps accurately, or even close (about one step read for every three taken). So, unless you believe that Republican budget math is accurate (in which case these will work just fine at counting your steps in the same way), the McPedometers don't work well and aren't worth the plastic they're made of. The coroner won't be able to get anything out of the Adult Happy Meal pedometer after your untimely demise other than that you should have eaten somewhere other than McD's instead.
and we all know how well Microsoft knows security - I guess if they can't build better locks, they would figure that executing people for breaking and entering is reasonable.
Innocence itself is not evaluable in the absence of evidence - I can claim "I didn't do X" in the absence of evidence that I didn't do X, and the courts will come to the same conclusion they did before. I made the assumption that "actual innocence" as a claim for appeal is backed by evidence that supports that claim, because without the evidence, one is blowing smoke. In that sense, Justice Scalia is correct - a claim of innocence with no evidence to support it is not a sufficient cause for appeal.
In most cases where actual innocence is used as a basis for appeal, there is (some) evidence to support the assertion. In some fraction of those cases, the prisoner is gaming the system - however we have other means to look at the balance of evidence in cases than to ignore such claims. For civil cases, we have dismissal with prejudice and malicious prosecution for bad cases (and maybe also others - IANAL). It should be possible for either other judges or intermediaries to look at a claim for appeal and determine if it has sufficient merit to proceed. That might help, or there might be other ways to do it that would avoid overwhelming the system. In other cases, the evidence is better, and in those cases, a claim of actual innocence isn't required to make the case worth looking at - it just makes the claim more urgent. If most cases were simply claims of innocence without support, then removing actual innocence as a cause for appeal would help unburden the judicial system and would make sense, but I don't know if such claims make up a significant fraction of cases.
Actual innocence as an unsubstantiated claim shouldn't be a basis for appeal - my assumption reading the quote was the Scalia was referring to cases where such evidence exists (or else the cases in which he made the remark would not have proceeded to get to the SC). The only alternative (to the presence of evidence in an actual innocence claim) I can see is if the defense believes that the evidence is consistent with the innocence of their client, but that doesn't suffice to make a claim of actual innocence (the evidence only says the person hasn't been proven to have done the crime, not that he didn't do it). In the case, though, the defense is SOL without other evidence.
I agree with your point - I made some assumptions in coming to the defense of "actual innocence" claims that may have been different than what Justice Scalia meant. I just figured that most such claims include other evidence to support the claims, and with such evidence, the claims should be heard by someone.
in a book of quotations, there was a quote (apparently it wasn't for its humor or wit) where an IRA assassin said "Christ, I'm in the wrong house." I don't know which violent act that referred to, but it doesn't sound like a successful one. Rule one for successful assassins - kill the right person. (Of course, that ignores ST Rule One for assassinations - "kill the assassins." - but that's neither here nor there).
Then we have mishaps such as an elderly preacher in Columbus dying of a heart attack when the police showed up in SWAT gear to bust the wrong house, or the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The first could have been prevented with data such as that being gathered here.
...while there is (a lot) of frivolous defense by people convicted of really bad things trying to stay alive by gaming the legal system, apparently it hasn't prevented significant numbers (at least 75, probably > 100, or at least 2% of death penalty cases) of innocent people from being convicted.
The evidence that more than a few of the people convicted of death penalty crimes were innocent (including half? of IL's death row) indicates that the system is flawed. The existence of these flaws and the fact that we know they exist requires us to do something about them, both for the sake of the people wrongly convicted and the people subject to crimes by an unknown person. Any privilege will be abused, but that abuse does not seem reason enough to negate innocence as a cause for appeal - by doing so, one negates much of why the justice system exists in the first place (to appropriately punish the guilty and to protect the innocent). Even if you cut the number of prisoners gaming the system, you have removed much of what is just and useful from the justice system and thus have won what can be described as a Pyrrhic victory at best.
(I haven't RTL) What is Scalia's justification for this? If there is "no basis is text, tradition, or even contemporary practice" to demand that evidence that the courts got the wrong person, why do they call it the "justice system"? In a case where evidence indicates that an innocent person was convicted, the justice system neither protected the people (the real person who committed the crime may still be free to do more) nor served justice (one person is paying for the crimes of another); since these are the primary (if not exclusive) duties of the justice, what is its purpose for existence if not to act justly or catch criminals? (particularly when "just" has no political bias, but is a measure of having convicted the correct person for a given crime, rather than an opinion on either the crime or the consistency of prosecution, etc.)
One of the many reasons I dislike Justice Scalia (or at least his legal opinions)...
WalMart is also the outlet (or one of them with the soon-to-be-defunct K-Mart) that pressures/forces artists to sell modified versions of their albums at their stores (if they wish to sell them there at all). So while selling VC and modified DVD players doesn't imply hypocrisy (they could just be committed to giving everyone what they want to buy, after all), selling bastardized albums while selling VC does imply a certain level of hypocrisy (unless they also sell the non-bastardized albums, which I didn't think they did).
(this isn't a disagreement with you, just the source you cited)
I didn't hear (or wasn't listening?) when these same people complained about the variety of movies shown on cable and network TV with similar, TV studio-set mdifications to the depiction (picture size and pausing) and content of movies. Where was the concept of "artistic integrity" then? Oh, they were getting paid for it, so showing (and distributing a modified form of their work) is legal, while watching (and not distributing) a modified version of their work under my control should be illegal. Integrity, my a$$.
Is this just another example of the content providers deciding what "fair use" should be (although fair use has never been theirs to determine)?
Artists have the right to distribute and sell their work as they see fit.
I have the right to watch (use) the work as I see fit. If I only want to watch the bar fight scene in "Out for Justice" instead of sitting through the rest of the movie, I can. That's what "fair use" means - as long as I don't distribute my bowdlerized version, it removes no rights from the authors of a work. I know that I'm viewing a modified version - that's why I chose to watch it on that DVD player in the first place. As long as WalMart specifies the capabilities the DVD to its users, and others don't distribute the modified content, the author's rights haven't been infringed.
People may not see the work as the author would have wanted them to, but that has been true of movies since the capacity to control one's own viewing of those works (on VCRs and DVDs) has been possible. If the author wants a work to be seen only in a specific way, he needs to specifiy that it not be sold in DVD or VCR format so that only those who see the whole movie can have access to it, or control the ability to fast forward or rewind through a work. Of course, in that case, few people would actually buy the work, or modified versions would quickly be pirated and sold to fill the void. Since I don't see this happening, I will assume that either they aren't in control (likely) or don't care. If you play in the real world, you play by real world rules - and in this case the people who pay for and buy the movies want to control their viewing of movies and how they see them. The artists don't have control over how we see movies, and unless they don't release to copyable formats, they never will.
(side note) I didn't hear (or maybe wasn't listening) when artists complained about the regular showing of heavily modified movies on broadcast and cable channels. Why is this any less permissible or less consistent with the artists' intent in a work than the use of DVD with user-controlled censoring?
They didn't release single songs because there was no competition - because the record companies colluded to raise prices and control their supply chain. The only reason they started releasing single songs is because if they didn't, their market would download what they wanted for free. Most people would rather get their music legitimately than not, but they aren't willing to swallow crap to do so. So now, the music industry has a model that allows customers to get what they want legally, thus negating many of the reasons why people use P2P to get music.
The problem is that the music industry got rich by giving people what the music industry wanted them to have, charging what they could for it, and colluding to prevent others from undercutting them. The music industry didn't have to listen to its customers because they had nowhere else to go. Now, customers want music how they want it, because if they don't get it, they can go online and copy it for free - a few would have done this anyway, but now the widespread frustration with the music industry and their pricing drove many more to do so. If the music industry moves to restore the album model to online music, they will simply succeed at driving people back to copying music via Kazaa, etc.., with the consequent improvement in technology making infringers harder to catch.
You're correct - they don't get it, because they colluded, and so never had to listen to the people to whom they sold music. Now they have no choice but to listen to their market, otherwise they'll get robbed blind. The music industry wants to go back to the days of blissful ignorance when they could do what they want and their customers would buy whatever they sold; they're hoping that "trusted computing" and upload restrictions by Internet providers will bring it back for them. The problem is, people are angry, and now they know it, and they know that they can do something about it. The music industry can't unring the bell, no matter how hard they try. Once people know that they have power, they won't go back to being consumers without a fight. The record companies are closing their eyes and hoping that their problems go away, when all that's going to go away is their market.
That was Payne Stewart's (professional golfer, US Open winner) plane. His plane took off (with six people on board?) from Florida, went silent about thirty minutes after takeoff, and ended up crashing somewhere in South Dakota when it ran out of fuel.
There may be results from the FAA accident investigation - I don't know.
the ways...
1) Collusion (for which their customers got what - a whole $14 apiece?) in the sale of music - companies helped set the pricing of music despite what their customers would have told them had they listened.
2) the incestous relationship between radio stations and record (or at least many stations) - stations get goods and prizes for promoting bands (given by the labels) and so play the songs the labels want played, over and over and over... This wouldn't be so bad but the contraction in the ownership of radio means that many of the choices that would have existed for promoting bands outside of the RIAA don't exist. Thus people hear lots of homogenized crap on the radio and have the means to choose only which homogenized crap they listen to. (The RIAA has done their best to inhibit Internet radio, which would have undermined this as well).
3) Trying to take its users' fair use rights by copy protection. Since "copy protection" doesn't stop large-scale pirates or even moderately savvy copyright infringers, the only person who is stopped by copyright protection is the one who buys the music and follows the law. Essentially, the labels want to sell people's fair use rights to them, even though those rights aren't theirs to sell.
4) The music industry wants to sell albums with lots of filler - people want to buy good songs, not filler. So, instead of changing the quality or price of what they sold, labels ignored their customers and figured that their customers would always buy what they sold. Only because of illegal downloading of songs did things like iTunes, etc. come into play, filling a niche the music companies willfully ignored. When Napster and its spawn came, people could get what they wanted for free, but the system became popular not only because people could get something for nothing, but because it also gave them something they wanted (and couldn't get otherwise).
The record companies' business model was always doomed - as long as your plan is to sell crap (or good stuff mixed with crap) at your price, it will eventually fail, because either people will stop buying or some other company will steal your market. Their model isn't flawed because of the pursuit of copyright infringement (although their methods are heavy-handed and counterproductive, and the penalties assessed disproportionate); the need to pursue copyright infringement so zealously wouldn't exist had the industry treated its customers as if it wanted to earn their money rather than as if its customers' money were theirs by right. The RIAA figured it had 300M sheep for shearing - only now have they realized that some of the sheep have teeth, and 60M angry sheep can do nasty things to their shearers.
between NSA and their British equivalent - GCHQ? - that we would monitor British citizens for them and we would allow them to monitor Americans, and then pass on relevant information to one another. I don't know if this is correct, or just imaginative fiction, but it would neatly circumvent some of the legal prohibitions.
It has already been reported (in the Washington Times - about a year ago) that the Patriot Act 1 (which was written for terrorism and national security) has been used by the DOJ to circumvent the Constitution in a variety of cases against garden-variety criminals.
This doesn't seem like consistency in the application of the laws of the US, but enforcement to the contradiction of the law itself and the metalaw (the Constitution) under which it is empowered.
There is of course the issue of dealing with large problem first - a policy which works in most cases but seems to be ignored here. If porn were the US's only problem, then this might make sense. The Patriot Act, in theory, was passed to fight terror - yet the main initiatives that are designed to fight terrorism (Afghanistan, the search for OBL) have been ignored, downplayed, and given minimal resources while others with less saliency (Iraq, porn) have been given more resources, while the PA is used to do other things.
Even if the world were better off with less porn (an unproven assumption, at best), the resources spent fighting it aren't spent fighting more important issues, and so fighting it might (probably) make the US worse off. Considering the issue from which GWB draws much of his support (the "War on Terror") is the loser of the support being lavished on porn and obscenity, while the Administration's strength on terror is touted continually, I don't see how this fits any sense of either consistent law enforcement or policy.
...or TV, or cable - but they do expect to own their magazines and newspapers which they expect to be able to keep. Subscriptions models (or at least popular ones) tend to give individuals ownership, not just use, of content - not to distribute, but to use as they see fit. In addition, music has been sold for nearly a hundred years - no one expects to subscribe to music. Rental and subscription models work with movies, but only because bandwidth limits the copying of movies between computers. DivX failed because it cost like owning movies, required new hardware, and restricted the users' ability to do what they wanted with their movies in the timeframe for which they had use. Janus has all of the same disadvantages as DivX, plus the potential for higher prices (so the music companies can make more money on subscriptions while screwing the artists further because of the decreased revenue per song).
People are already used to purchasing their music - if one hundred years of doing so wasn't enough, other download services provide it already. Of course, we also have copyright infringement as well - via Kazaa, eMule, etc. - which has accustomed many to the idea of getting their music for free while being able to do what they want with it. All of these things argue against the success of subscription plans for music.
Of course, there is the bonus that many of the people who would think of this are dissatisfied with MS, and that as others have already brought up on this thread, all this copy protection requires to be circumvented is an analog-to-analog cable. Given the success of Kazaa, and the frustration of many with the music industry (and their desire for free music and their unwillingness to pay for crippled versions of such), this should take less than a year to be utterly pillaged, or to die a fiery death as P-O'd users pelt MS with tomatoes for selling them yet another crippled product.
Does this sound like Trusted Computing to you? In TC, everyone (MS, the RIAA and MPAA) can trust your computer but you...because you are no longer Microsoft/Intel's customer - the media companies are. It's their well-being that Trusted Computing is designed to benefit, rather than their users and purchasers. And if it takes flight (along with bandwidth controls) the output will be just like TV - a "push" medium where you (or, more accurately) your money is the product.
It worked in TV, and if people are stupid or negligent enough to let it happen to computers, it'll work there too.
then why does the CCP have to spend so much energy to prevent people from getting information uncongenial to it? If the CCP's decisions and methods are correct, won't an open discussion of them reveal that? If so many concur, then the agreement would strengthen the Chinesse government, and give it the far stronger backing of >600 M people. Instead, the CCP spends its time trying to prevent uncongenial information from getting to its people and keeping an army to suppress them, moves which cost it both resources to build itself better and standing in the markets and the world community upon which its future rests.
This isn't the behavior of a stable government in concurrence with its people, but a government perched on a pinnacle, which can be toppled with just a few of the right words. The US tolerates a lot of hypocrisy, but it endures because the availability of information allows people to judge their government (somewhat openly); thus while there is dissent on a daily basis, the dissent doesn't destroy the gov't system. The US has many small cracks, but it doesn't fall apart because it isn't brittle and the cracks don't spread - people have enough confidence in it that dissent doesn't coalesce against the system. The CCP doesn't behave as if it were confident in its correctness - dissent not expressed hardens into rebellion, and threatens the entire nation. The Chinese gov't behaves like a brittle structure - the CCP has to prevent cracks (dissent) because their disagreement with their people means that cracks will propagate and break the structure. If your structure can tolerate cracks and still stands, you don't worry about them because it's a waste of time and money. Cutting off information that disagrees with the CCP implies either 1) the people aren't smart enough to succeed (which means China will go nowhere anyway) or 2) the people would rebel against the CCP if they read the information. 1) doesn't concur with experience (the large number of successful Chinese graduate students in America), so 2) is pretty likely, which doesn't agree with your initial statement.
A gov't in the right doesn't need to shield its people from the truth.
with voting there is a rule/problem (I don't know its name - Condorcet is all that comes to mind) that any vote with more than two participants may yield cycles (for example, in some cases, A is prefered to B is preferred to C is preferred to A....) or other nonoptimalities; thus voting methods may not give results consistent with what everyone would want of independent of how the vote is done. The problem with runoff systems (do you want A or B? do you want B or C?...) is that they depend on the order or options chosen; thus the person selecting the choices may have more power to determine the outcomes than the people nominally choosing the outcomes.
So while this way of putting choices resolves much of the problems with overwhelming choices, it potentially puts significant power in the hands of the one choosing the choices. Under certain circumstances this could be catastrophic, such as in gov't, where the selection procedure would give the voters the appearance of power and responsibility while concentrating the actual decision-making capacity elsewhere, out of sight and responsibility. I don't know a practical method around this because any of the multiple voting systems can behave badly under certain circumstances, just that this may be flawed. I believe the same problems apply to the decision making method above.
The problem with the decision is that, since SCO actively employs contracts as weapons to use against their customers, any protection given by such contracts is illusory. Effectively, contracts with SCO protect their rights and remove yours. Previous experience would have indicated this with not much research. SCO has sued their customers more consistently and with greater effect than non-customers; being their customer is probably a guarantee of a suit, while not being a customer only leaves them with a chance of being sued. Even if not buying the licences were guaranteed to lead to a suit, the risk isn't much worse than the risks of being their customer, and your ability to defend against the suits is greater as a non-customer than a customer. If I have to fight SCO, I'd rather fight with all of my weapons intact than be their "buddy" only to be caught suprised and defenseless when they stab me in the back.
The only legitimate business question is whether choosing to buy SCO's "licences" would subject EV1 to more risk (both from SCO's use of contracts and from angry users) than being sued by SCO (and the consequent loss of users and gain in competitors' FUD) would. I don't know the answer to that.
I'm glad that Mr. Marsh admitted it was a mistake to sign on with SCO, but it would have been better had he (or the company's lawyers and businesspeople) thought this over some more before he did it.
I haven't RTA, but how does this exactly deal with the spam that comes from zombied computers and/or spoofed email addresses? While I wouldn't waste $2K to send spam, a spammer (who is paying for almost nothing else that he's using to send the crap anyway) wouldn't care about that money because it's not his. Thus he has no incentive (in fact, he has a larger incentive) to commit illegal acts - because spam that is whitelisted is likely to be more effective that spam that isn't.
At best, this seems like a large fine for not having sufficient security on your server (or for getting a virus that exploits an unpatched hole), which could be done more fairly by some other authority. At worst, it would be a cash cow for the certifying authority while driving legitimate email (since most mail is probably from nonservered or clueless people) elsewhere. This doesn't seem like a good idea, but I could be mistaken.
I haven't liked the concept of E-books because I don't want to lend my entire library out; I want to lend one book to someone and not be able to read that book, rather than have my entire library disabled when I let someone borrow a book - that hasn't been the case with e-books. Add the lack of additional functionality and I don't have a convincing reason to buy one.
People don't have the right to distribute material covered under copyright laws without the holders' permission.
Copyright holders have to allow certain uses for the distribution of their works (educational, etc.)
Why is that when copyright holders and their supporters (e.g the MPAA/RIAA) ask us to "respect copyright", they conveniently neglect their own imposition of copyright protections that can be easily dismantled by anyone but those willing to follow the law, and thus designed only to remove copyright-enabled privileges from those who do follow the law? Respect works two ways - yet for the RIAA, respect for copyright law is only reasonable when it benefits them.
Copyright infringement won't improve the artists' share of their own revenues (though P2P and legal downloading of songs may do that), nor will it halt the erosion of the rights of the people over copyrighted works. However, without copyright infringement, these issues would have been considered by very few, and probably ignored by most. Would song downloads (outside of the album format) have come about without the threat of copyright infringement? Since there was no competition with the RIAA, there was no alternative to choose that offered these until copyright infringement made it clear that a lot of people wanted songs, not albums. The RIAA is the limiting case - they have both colluded to maintain prices and selection and have also helped to erode the rights of the people over copyrighted works. By colluding, they negated legal ways for individuals to choose other ways to get music, and circumvented the ability of the market to control their behavior. This didn't leave much alternative for lots of people, and feeling screwed, they did what in other circumstances their consciences would have inhibited - they infringed the copyrights of others.
I don't disagree with your premise - there are good reasons why copyright infringement is a crime and why those who engage in it should be pursued. The problem for me is that copyright law is supposed to guarantee both my rights in using their works (but not distributing them) and the rights of the copyright holders to sell and distribute their works - at this moment, copyright law seems to be applied selectively to those who infringe the rights of the holders of copyright and not for those who infringe the rights of the people to use the copyrighted works. The RIAA in particular has short-circuited the ability of the market to enforce the rights of the users of copyrighted works, and the gov't has followed the money to the copyright holders' pockets. I am frustrated with the situation - I won't copy, but I don't know how else my rights as a user of copyrighted works will be taken seriously.
junk mailers pay for their use of the mail system - theoretically, they may even pay for some of other users' mail through their rates. Contrast with spam, where the evil bast@*d^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspammers don't pay for any of the bandwidth they use other than what they pay for their spamming computer (and the real lowlifes don't even pay that - they use viruses, etc. to zombie others into paying for and sending their spam). In addition, junk mail that lies can be subject to mail fraud, which can involve time in the federal prison system and a roommate/significant other named Bubba; presumably spam is subject to wire fraud stautes if it lies, but the spammers are harder to catch (I don't know if any spammers have been successfully prosecuted for this).
Junk mailers pay to send their messages. Spammers steal (bandwidth, time, cycles) from others to send theirs.